Education & Technology (and some History)

Category Archives: Greece

I have been a fan of Google Art & Culture from the days when it was called Google Art Project. By combining Google Maps with Google Art & Culture, you can take a tour of your favorite museums using street view. The latest annotations in Google Art & Culture are far more robust and in depth. Check out this video produced by Google to see how easy it is to use the new features:

I am a big fan of the Google Cultural Institute; it’s an amazing repository of Artistic Masterpieces, Wonders of the Natural World, Historical Artifacts, and more. By using it as a repository of digital materials, it’s an easy way to access cultural content from around the world in my classroom. I can pull up a high definition image of Van Gogh’s Starry Night and use its powerful zoom features so that students can see the impasto brush strokes. We can explore the Street Art of Sao Paulo with a Google Street View for a unit on modern art or the Ruins at Angkor Wat…

Great Mosque at Damascus by G. Lewis, courtesy of Smarthistory & Flickr

Khan Academy is popular in math for its brief lectures and interactive modules. However, you can also use it in the Social Studies. Check out Smarthistory, a free multimedia platform for student and teacher of history, archaeology, museum curation, and art history.

The Vatican and Bodlein Libraries, in conjunction with a grant from the Polonsky Foundation, have gone digital. Now instead of booking a reservation with the librarians and hopping on a plane to Italy or England, patrons can simply log on to the website in order to browse and view thousands of digitized manuscripts including a copy of the Gutenberg Bible and medieval copies of the Talmud.

To learn more about the overall process and upcoming releases, be sure to follow their blog and read their “about this project” page.

The Perseus Digital Library is pleased to announce the 1.0 Release of the Perseus Catalog.

The Perseus Catalog is an attempt to provide systematic catalog access to at least one online edition of every major Greek and Latin author (both surviving and fragmentary) from antiquity to 600 CE. Still a work in progress, the catalog currently includes 3,679 individual works (2,522 Greek and 1,247 Latin), with over 11,000 links to online versions of these works (6,419 in Google Books, 5,098 to the Internet Archive, 593 to the Hathi Trust). The Perseus interface now includes links to the Perseus Catalog from the main navigation bar, and also from within the majority of texts in the Greco-Roman collection.

The release allows broader access to Greek and Latin texts in the original language as well as in translation. This is an excellent resource and tool for educators and students in ancient history, Classics, Latin, and Greek.

Homer’s Iliad is one of the most famous works of Bronze Age Greece. Its date and composition, however, is one of the academically controversial. Recently, a group of researchers at the University of Reading applied the same techniques to researching genetic evolution (using the rate of genetic mutation) to the evolution of language. Using this method, they determined that the Iliad was written approximately 762 BCE +/- 50 years; a date consistent with historical theories.

“Languages behave just extraordinarily like genes.It is directly analogous. We tried to document the regularities in linguistic evolution and study Homer’s vocabulary as a way of seeing if language evolves the way we think it does. If so, then we should be able to find a date for Homer.” — Mark Pagel, Ph.D.

George Eliot wrote that ‘the happiest women…have no history’; such a philosophy embodies that for women in the ancient world there is a great lack of communication from women themselves. So to what extent is the historian thwarted by this lack of communication?

One of the biggest problems facing the historian of women in the ancient world is that there are very few sources that are written by women themselves; there is a general lack of communication. So is it possible to trace their history even without their own sources? Gould describes women in the ancient world as a muted group, made inarticulate by the lack of a language in which to communicate their particular sense of society and its relationship to the totality of experience. While other academics believe that the history of women can be interpreted through numerous sources contributed by males, such as tragedies and comedies, this…